Payments
Connect Polar
Polar charges the buyer as the seller of record: it adds and pays sales tax and VAT, then pays you out. You stay the seller in your own Polar organization.
Connect your account
- Make a token. In Polar, open Settings, then Developers, and make an organization access token. Give it these scopes:
organizations:read,products:write,checkouts:write,orders:read,subscriptions:read,refunds:write,customer_sessions:writeandwebhooks:write. Pick a long expiry. - Connect it. In Payments, under Polar, choose Connect on the Test side and paste a token from Polar's sandbox (sandbox.polar.sh). We store it encrypted.
- That's all. We add our webhook to your organization ourselves, and make one product per app the first time it sells.
- Connect live at go-live. Repeat with a token from polar.sh on the Live side.
- One connection serves all your apps. Test and live connect separately.
- When the token expires, Payments says so. Connect again with a new one.
- To send one app through Polar while others use Stripe or PayPal, pick Polar on that app's Pricing tab.
How the buyer pays
The watch's QR code opens Polar's own checkout on the phone, already linked to that watch. Polar adds tax where the buyer lives. After paying, the buyer comes back to our page and the watch unlocks.
Fees
Polar takes its own fee on each sale, higher than Stripe's on small prices. Our plan price is the same whichever processor you use.
What we listen for
| Polar event | What it means | What the watch does |
|---|---|---|
order.paid | Paid, or a subscription renewed | Unlocks within about a second if its buy screen is open; otherwise when it next asks. |
order.refunded | Refunded | Locks at its next check; at once if its buy screen is open. |
subscription.updated, subscription.canceled, subscription.revoked | A subscription changed or ended | Unlocked while it's paid for; locks once it ends. |
We read every event back from Polar before acting on it, and check it against the checkout we made: the watch and app, the amount, the currency, and sandbox or live.
Polar sends no event for disputes: check them in your Polar dashboard.
Refunds
Refund from the sale's page in the dashboard, or in Polar. Either way the watch locks.